


The Laurel Wreath

by eelia_faustus



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:59:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15814761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eelia_faustus/pseuds/eelia_faustus
Summary: Breathing slowly and deep, he looked outside the window and gazed at the bright disk of the full moon hanging high in the sky. It was quite a big moon and its light was strong, silvery and cold, and it met the warm one of the lamp in the middle of the room, as if in a battle for supremacy over darkness. It wasn't very late. He had still most of the night.Erwin’s last evening.





	The Laurel Wreath

**Author's Note:**

> This work was born from my boundless and everlasting love for Erwin Smith (although I’m unsure whether I did well by him in here or not) and from my listening for days on end to King Crimson’s song “Epitaph”, which I believe is the most frigging Erwin song on the face of Earth. So the fic is strewn with allusions and quotations from the lyrics.
> 
> I tried to stay as close as possible to canon in regard to various details, but I’m not sure whether or not I have managed. My memory for details is really dreadful and going back to verify if everything I write is congruent to canon is tiring and quite hindering, so I just did my best and tinkered here and there where needed: anything that deviates from canon is either deliberate or a slip of the mind. There’s virtually no plot in here—not in the classical sense of the word, at least; mostly, it is just a fuckton of introspection—so that’s no big deal anyway.
> 
> The fic is unbetaed and, not being a native English speaker, I apologise in advance for any mistakes.

PROLOGUE

 

Erwin Smith sat, gazing at the door, thinking.

The sunset light was in the room like a presence, setting one half of it ablaze in the bright hues of yellow and red, while the other one had already sunk into the violets of dusk where the edge of the Wall concealed the last part of the sun’s dive.

Outside, the light reflected off the window with such intensity that, if a passer-by glanced upwards from the road, he would think that, behind the panes, a silent, smokeless fire was raging. But nobody was walking along the streets of Trost, and Erwin burned unseen in that quiet holocaust of light.

It was, this, his favourite time of day—when everything was silent and dilated; the objects’ edges lost their clearness, blending into shadows and swelling like darkness-soaked sponges, and even the wall’s perimeter closing the district seemed a bit wider.

He was a strange man, or so he had always been considered. There had never been a single person—except perhaps his own father—who had ever claimed to know just what was going on through his mind at a given moment. Since childhood, he had always been the quiet, passionate type—the ever-questioner—with a fearlessness before truth and a precocious devotion to it. In the years, his mind had become fast, muscular and well trained, much like a racing colt; he did what very few people did, in a world like theirs: he thrived in thought. Which probably did make a strange man of him, after all. 

Erwin sat, gazing at the door which had just closed behind Levi, and thought. What is obedience?, he asked himself. He leaned forward and absently pressed the palm of his hand over the wooden surface of the table that was in front of him. 

To obey is to surrender your own will in order to act according to the will of another.

He drummed his fingers slowly, one, two times.

“I trust your judgement,” Levi had said just before he turned around and left; and though he had said so in a subdued tone and with the tiniest vein of spite in his voice, Erwin knew that he had meant it completely. Which did not sound like obedience at all; rather, it was with devotion that Levi had always met Erwin’s will at every cross-roads—not surrendering his own, but reaching with it so that the two could meet and become one. 

_And you, Erwin Smith; are you a devoted man?_

He stood up, the movement ungraceful; his own body felt like a stranger to him; he sensed that his control over it was gone forever, and gone with it was his imposing demeanour. He wondered, not for the first time, how he must appear to his men—if they saw him like he saw himself. He brought his hand to his stump and knew then how true it was that he could not fight anymore. Yet, though his body was crippled, his soul was set.

He went to stand by the window and looked at the street below. He hoped to see Levi standing there. But there was no one in sight, and he was reminded just then of how, at the beginning, Levi would often disappear and of how there was no way to find out where he’d gone, not until he decided to show up again, and when he did, it was just as suddenly as he had gone. It was Hange who had first found him in the barracks where Levi had stayed with the squad to which he and his friends had been assigned, and which had long remained empty. Levi kept it spotless. For a long time when he was still a captain, Erwin had wanted to go into that barracks, but had ended up desisting; until Levi had started to come into his office. From that moment there had been no need to look for him anymore, and the barracks was left to cobwebs and dust. 

Erwin could not quite tell just then why the memory filled him with such tenderness as it did in that moment. He smiled to himself as a different kind of fondness took him, one that was veined with sadness.

He was looking outside, down the dusty road where men would soon walk again, and the road became to him the surface of the whole Earth. He thought of his father—of how he used to cup his son’s nape and squeeze. 

Erwin Smith was a strange man—a leader and a wanderer, a seer of vision; at the core of himself, he was very much alone.

Suddenly, he caught sight of Levi. He was leaning against the wall of a house that stood on a side street; he was standing into the shadow of the house and that was why Erwin hadn’t seen him before. His arms were limp against his sides and he had the hunching shoulders of someone who is very tired; he was turned with his back towards Erwin and he could not see his face.

Forgive me, Levi, he thought, for my selfishness, and he wanted strongly that thoughts could ride on the wind.

⸺

 

In its descent, the sun had long since gone past the walkway on top of Wall Rose, when Erwin went down in the street; Trost was bathed in the dim light of dusk and lay solitary under the purple-red sky. Erwin left the Town Hall behind him, from which he had come out, and walked down the empty street.

A warm breath of wind blew against his back. The acrid smell of blood and death had covered the smell of dust, overflowing gutters and poverty—the smell of too many people crammed together in too small a place, the smell of every town after the fall of Wall Maria—and now the wind had blown away the smell of slaughter from the deserted district. The stench of civilization had not yet come back to spread its fumes among the houses, and one could now breathe an air that was redolent of wild fields, much like the one that could be smelled outside the Walls.

Many of Trost’s buildings were still precarious from the day of the disaster and it had not been an easy feat to find a place for a hundred men of the Survey Corps. The district infirmary, the only building that was equipped with enough beds, was condemned, and nobody had wanted to lodge into the people’s houses. Trost still lay on human territory and its reconstruction was now just beginning, however slowly, and the families would soon be able to come back into their homes. The Titans had come, they had destroyed and devoured; the soldiers didn’t want to add their indiscretion to the tragedy. 

In the end they had opted for the only buildings of sufficient size that had suffered little or no damage. The Garrison’s headquarters would host the officers, while the other men would lodge in the Town Hall with makeshift beds and cots. 

As he walked down the silent streets towards the Garrison building, Erwin wondered if it could be possible to use the Titans’ hardening ability for reconstructing purposes, other than for the upgrading of the walls; but after a moment he decided that it was better to leave that kind of evaluations to Hange.

Looking around, Erwin could not help thinking that, whatever state Trost lay in, it would be nothing compared to what they would find in Shiganshina.

Based on what some witnesses had reported—first among all Eren Jaeger, Ackerman and Arlert—hell had broken loose over there and the district was completely destroyed, and so it had laid for little more than five years. God only knew what they would find in Shiganshina.

_Shiganshina._ The mere thought made him restless, almost feverish. An inextinguishable hunger that had nothing to do with his stomach gripped him; his limbs were shot through with a certain electricity, and he had to suppress the impulse of breaking into a run, of grabbing at the air with his fingers. The phantom pain in his arms had increased terribly in the last few hours, and he could reasonably foretell that it would be a real bitch that night; but he felt both euphoric and frightened, and his fear only heightened his excitement, and an exalted smile threatened to steal to his lips at any moment.

There was also that other matter, of course, which Erwin would rather not think about, but to which everybody seemed unfailingly to allude to—as it often happens when we hold something back, even to ourselves—even if they knew absolutely nothing about it, and which had an eerie magnifying effect on both his fear and his elation about what lay ahead.

It was nothing new; on the contrary, it was something that rooted very far back, something that Erwin had pushed at the far back of his mind and over which he had laid a sort of veil. But the last month’s events had started to tear at it, until the veil had become so battered that what it was supposed to cover could be glimpsed at any moment. Thinking about Shiganshina, Erwin could feel his thoughts creep out from under the veil and acquire a tangibility of their own; he could feel them in that very moment, lurking behind him in the shadows of the empty alleys like a gang of criminals tailing him, waiting to jump on him at the first cue . . . 

But those were thoughts that belonged to Erwin Smith, son of a History teacher. They had nothing to do with the Scouting Legion’s commander. Bringing his hand to his chest, over the stone he wore around his neck, Erwin decided that he would spend his night reviewing the plans for tomorrow’s expedition. Departure was set for the evening; there would be time to rest. The men had all gone to have a propitiatory celebration with the food provided by the Reeves family—nobody would bother or mind him. When he reached the building where he had his lodgings, he wondered if he should join the party, but he put the idea aside as soon as he started to consider it; he realized, not without surprise, that he didn’t want to see Levi. Digging deeper into this sudden realization, he found within himself a trace of resentment towards his captain that he did not quite understand.

No, he told himself, I will work on the mission tonight, in case there are elements that we overlooked. 

Erwin did not know yet that the veil had been ripped off, that day, and that it had been Levi’s words that did it. He was naked before himself.

 

When Erwin got to his room, he closed the door behind himself; it was small and spartan—a standard room for an officer with a single bed in the centre and a desk placed below the only window, where Erwin intended to spend the night—his papers ready for the task. The curtains were not drawn and they let in the dim light of the dying day. Soon he would not see anymore, Erwin considered, and he went to the only bedside table on which an oil lamp was placed; he lit it. Beside the lamp there was a tray with a water jug and a single glass; Erwin regarded it with irritation, wishing it were tea or strong coffee, or maybe wine, but he filled himself a glass anyway, ready to get to work.

He brought the water to his lips and took a sip, and as the cool liquid went down inside of him, a cold disquiet washed over him. He froze and he realized that whatever it was that he had sensed that was following him along the street earlier, it had sneaked behind him and was now into the room. Suddenly, the corners were crowded with names and faces, and the thoughts that dwelled in the deep recesses of his mind crowded on him. 

Erwin put down his half-full glass and fought with the impulse of looking over his shoulder; he refused to humour this ludicrous apprehension, but a part of him was truly afraid of what he would see if he turned around, and Erwin blamed it on weariness and too much excitement. He wished he could blame it on the wine, but unfortunately he hadn’t drunk any of the stuff in days. 

He walked a couple of steps towards the desk, where the plans to regain Wall Maria were waiting to be revised for the umpteenth time, the last one, but he stopped dead in his tracks; a frightening, paralysing presentiment crept into his mind, and in that moment he was certain that if he touched those papers—if he so much as looked at them—the mission would end up in a slaughter, and everything would be lost. 

Erwin damned himself as he took a step back; he damned himself and his mind, which for the first time since he could remember was eluding him completely. 

He went to the door and locked it, before he started to undress until he was in his shirtsleeves and barefooted with only his trousers on. Setting aside all his plans of working, he lay on the bed, the lamp burning beside him.

For a moment all he did was stare to the drawer at the foot of his bed, which contained his belongings, throwing wary glances into the corners form time to time, where the shadows were gathering. Then he closed his eyes and started to think.

 

In prison it had been impossible to keep the thoughts at bay. They seemed to exude from the very walls, like dampness—layers and layers of thoughts that had accumulated there, an invisible trace of every prisoner who had waited there for judgement. They resurfaced from darkness and stone, and they coalesced, taking the shape of the ghosts of he or she who was there to meet them. Erwin had done anything to cast them away, but the thoughts kept coming, until he had ceased to resist them.

It wasn’t the loneliness, it wasn’t the dull pain gripping his stiff body in its jaws, nor the one in his manacled arm, pinned above his head, as the iron cut into his wrist; these were soon outweighed by the agony in his phantom arm, which sometimes left him gasping on the filthy straw. It wasn’t the pain, nor the beating, nor the insinuating fear of his imminent execution.

It was the darkness.

His cell was in the dungeons; his corridor was empty and not a single candle had been lit down there. Every now and then, a soldier of the Military Police came to bring him food and water, and he brought a torch to see where he was going; that was the only light Erwin ever saw. He spent most of the time in pitch blackness and in complete ignorance of the passing of the hours and days. The darkness in which he sat made an empty immobility of time and space itself became nothing but a void that was even emptier.

It had never struck Erwin as clearly as it did in that indefinite time spent in the dark, and it never would again, how the human brain needs a visual anchor to function properly, and how vulnerable it becomes once the blind eyes are left to wander in darkness. He had felt his eyes widen more and more, searching for the slightest speck of light, and his thinking process, usually keen and penetrating, had drawn inwards like the prey surrounded by a pack of ravenous wolves. From the dark, his most turbid thoughts had started to advance on him.

For Erwin, those were mostly thoughts of his father.

Sometimes he thought he could see him there in the dark with him, and he wanted to crawl to his feet and ask for forgiveness, pleading for his blessing; his father—condemned by his own son’s careless tongue and murdered by a world which had seen in his ideas too big a threat. But his blood as well as his idea lived on within his son, and Erwin knew that he had his father’s blessing to carry on his own mission, if not his forgiveness.

In his days of imprisonment, Erwin started to grow a resentment which was wholly personal, of which he too was not entirely conscious, and that acted on his mind like a whetting stone; it made it sharper and more audacious. A new determination was born inside of him, and it was that determination that Nile saw in his smile in the throne hall, when the fruits of his last gamble were harvested. But it was the desperate determination of a son and of a man who was caught in his own crossfire.

In the dark, Erwin had rejoiced, for he had seen that the wall that blocked his sight—on which the prophets wrote, and built by those who know and who are known so that humanity could see no farther—was cracking at the seams. Yet he had not rejoiced together with humanity delivered, but as a man who sought something to sweeten his own guilt—as a man who was approaching his own ruin without knowing it . . . or knowing it all too well.

Sometimes, Nile would come to keep him company and in those occasions he never failed to let Erwin know exactly what he thought of his foolishness. Erwin let him, without saying anything; sometimes Nile too would not say anything, lost in his own thoughts, and Erwin let him be: he was company and light, and the shape of his own father slumped on the filthy straw, the bad thoughts advancing, whatever was happening outside that he had had no news of—all this could be forgotten for a while.

Regardless of his belligerent nature (and of whatever insulting idea Levi had of him), Nile was not a bad man, and Erwin felt a sincere friendship towards him that went deeper than Nile himself could see. He was not a bad man, just one of those who Erwin had never been able to understand fully (and in that he was tragically reciprocated) and who perhaps he envied just a little (and maybe he was reciprocated in that regard, too), even knowing that, even if he could, he would never have switched places with Nile; he knew this with the same vehemence with which Nile would have rejected a life such as Erwin’s. 

For men like Nile, order and peace and security made up the only possible world, the only _inhabitable_ world; they were the only thing to defend, the only certainty the world could offer and the only things it was worth fighting for; how that order, peace, and security had been won, how they were kept and if they were true and lasting or a mere delusion—all this did not matter one bit to them. Those were things in which only the likes of Erwin would meddle. Men like Nile, though, were driven by the fear of losing what they held most dear, and that fear governed them like the puppeteer does his puppets. Nile was not stupid nor obtuse; he simply insisted on not wanting to see, and mistook his blindness for common sense and wisdom. And maybe it was with a trace of pleasure that Erwin probed the false sense of security that prevented Nile from fighting for a world without walls.

But could he really be blamed, Nile, if in such a ruthless world as theirs he preferred the warmth of a family and the protection, however mistaken, of an existence without shudders or revolutions; could he be blamed for not wanting to give up on all this, knowing that, in exchange, all he would get was uncertainty and death? Erwin—who had driven all this away from himself forever, who had given up all this with a grave firmness, who would forever renounce all the happiness in the world to be granted a single moment of clarity—in the darkness of his cell, he thought for a moment that he could understand Nile perfectly well.

And so Nile came to him, with his clumsy scorn all in view, and Erwin let him. For Nile was, first of all, a token of times past, when doubt was only a distant phantom, when all had seemed so full of promise and possibilities to their loud idealism, and Erwin was just Erwin—the responsibilities far away except the one for his own life, which he shared with every innocent child on the street—and he and Nile and Mike⸺

Erwin opened his eyes.

Mike.

He missed Mike terribly, and he was surprised of how that absence presented itself to him so sudden and only in that moment. Mike had been for him the closest thing to a brother he had ever had; he had been his companion, his shoulder; he had been the only one who had never had anything to say about his ideas, welcoming them with a silence that stood neither for assent, nor for reproach; but the path he had chosen to follow and the placid strength with which he had walked on it spoke louder than any words. Down that road Mike had fallen, and Erwin and Nile lived.

The year they enlisted, Mike had been the best among the recruits. He never showed any inclination to join the Military Police, and the Garrison didn’t feel like a place for him. When Erwin asked him why he had chosen the Legion, Mike simply said: “I don’t like to just stand there doing nothing, if there is a place where I can make myself useful.” Erwin had looked at him and Mike had smiled, patted him on the back and went to bed.

Since Erwin was made commander, Mike had been a silent and invaluable presence by his side, as much as Levi’s presence was loud and irreplaceable.

Mike’s body had never been found. Erwin was sure there was his face, too, among the ones that crowded the corners. If someone had told him, that day of a long time ago, that he would die alone and far from home, would he still have followed Erwin? Maybe not—and yet, just maybe, he would have anyway.

His mind wandered towards the memory of a conversation they had some time before Wall Maria fell. He was sitting in front of his papers and the maps for the new formation he had wanted to submit to the then-commander Shadis, but his mind was elsewhere, standing before a barracks which doors had always remained closed. Mike’s voice abruptly brought him back to the present.

“Everyone’s wondering,” he had said offhandedly, “how it is possible for you two to go along so well.”

Erwin looked at him; there was no question of who ‘you two’ were, and for a frightening instant he considered the possibility that Mike’s nose could detect thoughts as well; maybe it wasn’t only his sense of smell that was inordinately developed; maybe all Mike’s five senses had combined into one sixth sense that heightened his perceptions well beyond human capacity.

“Is that so,” he had replied, noncommittally.

“Yes, it is so. And I have my own theory about that.” An odd smile was playing upon his lips.

Erwin looked at him silently. It happened only seldom that Mike felt like chatting, and Erwin had found himself afraid of what he would say.

“Let’s hear it then.”

“Well, both of you are difficult people. Difficult as in a-big-pain-in-the-ass difficult for all of us poor boys who only want to chill between a carnage and a bloodshed. Birds of a feather flock together, I guess.”

Erwin looked at him, open-mouthed and a little relieved, and answered with a laugh.

“I thank you well for your penetrating insights and for your inestimable contribution to the sociology of the Survey Corps. You should discuss it with Hange,” he said.

“Oh, she has her ideas, all right.”

Mike had went on to laugh at his own wit and retreated back into his silence, and Erwin had thought the conversation to be over. But after a while Mike spoke again and Erwin’s head whipped up. Mike’s low voice, usually calm and contemplative, had an edge of reticence in it. But it hadn’t been his voice to make Erwin prick up his ears: it was what Mike was saying.

Mike had been a frank man, however thrifty with his words. But there were things he didn’t talk about. He wasn’t indifferent to them, and he participated in them, but his contribution in some matters remained, so to speak, non-verbal in its nature: one could sense what Mike’s opinion was by reading his expressions and the small movements he made with his body, which, if one knew how to decipher its language, was more eloquent than his mouth would ever be. That was what ultimately gave him his aura of trustworthiness and reliability, what shaped his solidity; of certain thing, Mike simply did not talk.

“No, that’s not true,” he had said then, though—his eyes fixed straight before him as if lost in the void, as if he had suddenly forgotten himself and where he was, and above all forgetting that Erwin was there, listening to him and not believing his own ears. “Levi’s got one hell of a temperament, alright—hell, there’s a man who insist on keeping a dreadful air about himself, if I ever saw one. He has a difficult nature, sure. But a difficult man? No, I don’t think he is. You, though . . . you are . . . you have something that⸺”

He had been so engrossed in his line of thought that he hadn’t noticed Erwin staring at him in disbelief. His face must have been quite a sight because when Mike finally did look at him, he fell immediately silent, his eyes became very wide and his body jerked and braced against the assault of someone whom he had surprised spying on him in a private moment.

Mike never finished his sentence, nor spoke of it ever again. He had smiled, walked over to where Erwin was sitting and briefly excused himself for keeping him by giving him a pat on the shoulder.

Now Erwin thought he knew what Mike had tried to say that day.

There was a place inside of him where nobody was allowed, and a threshold that could not be crossed; beyond that threshold, there lay perhaps his wonders, but nobody had lit the torches for them to be seen, and the place was shrouded in silence and it was like in a solitary cave in the middle of the desert, where an old anachoret kept celebrating his rituals and turning his prayers to his god, remote and resplendent: the knowledge of truth.

Erwin thought of truth as of a story—the most beautiful of all stories and the only one that was worth telling. He too had been hungry, avid for that story which came from his father, from the world, from himself; it was a good and honest story, reassuring even in its terribility, and he stood before it like a child, eager to be told more. Erwin had wanted to hear that story being told to him forever; but one by one those who should tell it had fallen silent and had sit down, leaving the world’s stage; until he, looking around himself, saw that he was, now, the storyteller.

Many things he had realized in his cell, and among these there was the knowledge that the story of truth was his to tell to humankind, and as a narrator, like a solitary earthly deity, his task was lonely and terrible and his duty was grim. His story could give the same freedom and the same joy he himself had felt while he sat listening to it; but what joy, what hope could find the narrator there? What kind of deliverance, in his own story, for he who must tell it, and what price was to be paid, for himself and for everyone . . . If he had known that distant faith, he would have found the image of the man, alone in the garden of Gethsemane—tired and worn, pleading for the cup to be taken away from his lips—surprisingly fitting. 

He didn’t even know if his truth was the right one to tell. He didn’t know, and the answer had many a face; beside the one that he had chosen for himself, countless other stories could be told. The hope that his was the best one seemed suddenly so arbitrary to him. Was it the best one? He didn’t know, he had never known—and it was what he had confessed to Zackley: if the aim lay with humanity, then maybe he was not the right man to lead them.

Oh, his mind had been turned away from humanity for a long time, it was since long ago—maybe forever. What did he know about humanity, in the end? What was it if not a cold abstraction? He didn’t know humanity; he only knew men.

Even today, Erwin could not say what it was that had induced him to confess to Zackley things he had almost never dared to confess to himself. Maybe it had been the light, at last, after all that darkness, or the warmth inside the carriage that brought them swaying to headquarters; maybe it had been because his arm didn’t hurt so much anymore; he did not know what had prompted him to speak, but he had spoken and he had felt relieved.

Naturally, the old man had gotten right to the core of the matter. “Your duty is terrible as always; death would be preferable,” he had said, and Erwin had almost spilled out what sat on the tip of his tongue and was in his thoughts like an incessant pounding . . . 

When he had been sentenced to death he hadn’t felt any fear nor resentment; just, perhaps, a vague sense of disappointment that it would end like that, after all. More than anything—and this was what he did not dare confessing—he had felt relief washing over him like blessed unconsciousness after a long torture.

But to die he must kill his dream too, and that Erwin felt he could not do; to allow it would amount to sacrilege and it was, to him, profoundly shameful and repulsive. His dream was his because it had been given to him; and Erwin knew that it was what would wreck him in the end, but he also knew of the sweet tingle that it gave him and of how it honed his will. And above all, he had always been ready to die for humanity, but for his vision, for truth—to be the one who sees the truth and brings it back among men—he was ready to live. It wasn’t humanity’s dream, although it was for humanity that he dreamt it, and that made him a man: it was his, and he was the dreamer, the raver, the storyteller, and for it he was ready to meet his own fall.

Death would probably be preferable, but on that Erwin had said nothing; he felt he had a duty towards his men, his comrades—the living as well as the dead, his men present, past and future; and because of that his fall must wait. 

He saw his men’s faces, one by one—and he reached Levi’s.

Levi, his dear captain, his pride and his joy. _What would you think of me if you knew all this? Would you still look me in the eye? Could I still look you in the eye?_

Erwin saw Levi alone, he saw him as he scrubbed his sadness away in what had been the last home to his friends. He clearly saw the face he had had the first time he had come to see him of his own volition. He hadn’t said a word; he had remained with him, unspeaking, and then he had gone the same way he had come, and the next day he had come again, and the day after that, and the cobwebs and dust had returned into the last home of his friends.

There had been days, after their death, when Levi could not be found, and Hange had told Erwin that he was in the barracks close to the stables, cleaning and scrubbing his sadness away, and Erwin felt the courage at last to open the door and enter.

But inside it was not a barracks; it was the place where he and Nile and Mike used to meet as recruits, and the place was empty, except for Levi, who was cleaning the tables and scrubbed Erwin’s sadness away from the house of his friends. And Erwin went to him and Levi stopped scrubbing. He wore a barmaid’s dress and looked at him in a way that was delicately obscene, and Erwin grabbed him and lifted him, and pulled his skirts up his thighs and pressed him over a table and⸺

He woke up suddenly in pain and a moan almost escaped his lips. He had fallen asleep, but the sudden pain in his stump wrenched him away from his dreams. He sat up in his bed, clutching at his rioting flesh, trying to will the pain away. 

Phantom pain was a most puzzling thing; it could go from a dull throbbing that was fairly easy to ignore, and at times it spiked up to the point where he could swear down on his knees that he could feel the Titan’s teeth mangle his arm all over again. Right now it felt like a million feet stomping on a limb that was not even there anymore.

Breathing slowly and deep, he looked outside the window and gazed at the bright disk of the full moon hanging high in the sky. It was quite a big moon and its light was strong, silvery and cold, and it met the warm one of the lamp in the middle of the room, as in a battle for supremacy over darkness. It wasn’t very late. He had still most of the night.

He swung his legs to one side and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting patiently for the pain to subside. When the worst of it had passed, he got up and slowly walked to the desk where the plans for the mission still lay, untouched. 

He didn’t know whether he had to thank sleep or the pain, but he realized that he was feeling lighter: no more crushing sense of foreboding, no feelings of latent peril arose. He shuffled the papers and peered down at them, expecting only remotely to feel a little flare of warning; but he felt nothing at all. He sat down, and found out the chair was uncomfortable. His wake began.

 

Erwin sat. It was a moment of quiet and of waiting. Calm hung over Trost District. Erwin sat and the quiet of the night was into the room and inside of him.

His fingers drummed absently on the papers spread before him and his gaze was resting on the group of the formation to which Levi had been assigned, and his eyes had been on that spot for a long time. Erwin sat and wondered where Levi was.

He hoped that he was still with the others, because he knew that Mike had been right: no matter how difficult Levi’s temperament was, no matter how cross his manners, he didn’t like to be on his own. He didn’t like to be on his own, especially not before a mission, when, Erwin was sure of it, his memories hung heavily over him and the night was full of ghosts. Erwin hoped Levi was not on his own now. 

But he knew that he could not stay with the others all night, and that at some point it was inevitable for him to be alone; unless . . .

His fingers stopped drumming and were still, and Erwin realized then that that thought was impossible for him to explore, for there was a resistance inside of him that he could not name. It was that, in some fold of his mind, Levi had become a mirror of his own solitude. But he didn’t know that—he only saw that resistance and could not go any further. He let it go. And in that moment Levi was in his mind as he had seen him that evening, and Erwin thought of how haggard and drawn his face had been when he closed the doors of the meeting room behind him, how haunted Levi had seemed when he came to ask the only thing Erwin could not give him. And now Erwin sat in his dimly lit room and wished to see Levi.

He thought back longingly to the old headquarters, where he could look out of his window, which opened over the courtyard close to the stables and over the training field, and hope to see him somewhere below. He had looked at him from up there countless of times—as he brought his horse back to the stables, as he cleaned his blades and his harness, and most of all when he trained, alone or with his squad or with the recruits, sometimes with Mike. Most of the times, Levi didn’t know it—or pretended he didn’t know, for Erwin was pretty sure nothing could elude him—but sometimes he stopped to look up and, seeing him at the window, he nodded him a greeting. Sometimes, after, he would come up to him and ranted on for hours, complaining about the recruits’ carelessness and seeming lack of basic hygiene, of their solicitous discipline that resulted in countless mistakes when it was asked of them to think with their own heads. Erwin listened to him. He didn’t stop, not even when Erwin tried to set himself to work, saying that if he had time to pick at his ass by the window he surely had some to spare to listen to one of his captains making a report. Erwin, naturally, was delighted. 

Now the absence of that voice in his room amplified endlessly the silence of the night. Erwin wished to see Levi, and the force of that wish brought him to his feet and to stand by the window. He looked down to the empty street outside and he thought that he had watched Levi, unseen, countless of times, and every time a thought had kindled and the thought said: it was I who has made him. And Erwin knew it was a deceptive and arrogant thought, but his pleasure in watching Levi came to him from that thought; and even part of his pride towards Levi came from it.

As he stood by the window, a cloud came over him in the dark, for beside that thought there was another.

His knowledge of Levi reached back to a past in the underground of Mitras and to his difficult temper; he knew how he liked his tea and that he had enlisted to the Corps to kill him and buy his freedom. If someone had asked him why Levi had stayed, Erwin realized he wouldn’t know the answer. Were it his words that had convinced him, and the fact that he had no place left to go? Maybe that had been true in that moment, when Levi had put his sword back with which he had intended to slit his throat open; beyond that, Erwin could not go. His gaze travelled downwards and Erwin seemed to see just then that along with his arm his hand too had gone, the one which bore the scar that Levi had given him that day. Without that mark to hold on to, Levi seemed to him more distant and indecipherable than ever.

Being a man who had always been moved by a strong sense of a purpose, Erwin was inclined to believe that behind every action of every man there lay an equally powerful purpose. It wasn’t a spiritual conviction, nor a metaphysical one; rather, it was simple and practical, and deeply rooted. The years he had spent into the Legion taught him how that hidden purpose could be the key to an individual’s mind to anyone who got a hold on it, and only by knowing the motives that moved a man one could claim to know him and thus predict his actions.

Yet, perhaps, there was something metaphysical to it, after all; for, secretly and obscurely, Erwin knew how every man was torn apart with nightmares and with dreams, and he believed that there lay the mystery of man and that there lay the fertile secret of every single life.

It was for a strong hunger for life and for men that he had tested Pixis and Zackley; it was because of that hunger that he kept testing Nile’s convictions; and now he wondered if Historia was sleeping serenely, or if she too was restless, for it was upon her that he had put the hardest trial of all; he was the guide who acts outside the community of men, the outcast who delivers and who is blamed for it; whereas a symbol had been made of her, and though she had the same duty as he, she needed to be loved. There are circumstances where men sometimes find themselves in, where love is harder to bear than hate; Erwin, placing her on the throne, had put her in one.

He had tested Levi, too, and for the same reason, by entrusting the serum to him. But as he imagined him leaning against the meeting room’s doors—as if trying to prevent the duty, the dream, the world, to enter—Erwin saw that his core lay elsewhere. Not behind orders, it rather lay in his sullen looks and in his curt replies, in a handful of bloody patches hidden somewhere, in the muffled sound of a rag behind a closed door.

Erwin thought back to Mike’s words and found they implied a profound truth. Levi had himself a hunger for men, but it was a very different one, which, obscurely, made Erwin hungry of him: it was a simple and constant craving for human company and a subtle instinct to nurture it. Erwin, though—there was an inscrutability about him that made him untouchable; the threshold that nobody could cross kept him caged as well, and it seemed hard and unmoving. Levi dwelled in a dimension from which he was excluded, and the barracks doors had remained closed because that was not a place in which Erwin was admitted.

His mind stood as if nailed before that mystery and Erwin thought in the dark, Levi, what guides your hand? Do you fight for humanity—or for something that is only yours? Who are you, Levi?

To the empty room, he said softly: “Are you a better man than I am?”

And in the silent and lonely nights after each expedition, when his burden was heavy on him, the answer that was whispered in the shadows was “yes”, and the answer that had lingered in the darkness of his cell was “yes”; the word that exposed his guilt, the word that hid behind the veil was “yes”, and the veil was torn and behind it stood the knowledge of the verdict: your mind has long been turned from humanity and that is your cross . . . and it will be your death. For humanity in itself has no shared purpose, and so humanity meant little to him.

His father had told him, one day, that in the ancient myths the gods deemed Hubris—pride—to be the ugliest of sins, and they would strike down heroes and villains alike if they dared become too arrogant.

It was a lonely place up there in his tower; but he had got used to great heights and the vertigo was now sweet and caressing like a lover. It was the price to pay, anyway. He had come to believe that the inevitable fall couldn’t be too bad; he knew it would come very soon, and he readied himself for it carefully. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t already plummeting. 

Levi had told him he disgusted him, once. It was the day the Ragako boy had come with Hange to report about the village, bringing the portrait of his parents. For a moment, Erwin had forgotten himself and smiled. It had only be a second, but Levi, observant as always, had seen him. “You are disgusting,” he told him, and Erwin had wanted to tell him just how right he was, he had wanted to tell him all the reasons why he should feel disgusted by him. But for some reason, it had seemed vital to him back then that Levi should never know.

He had smiled because he was happy, and he was happy because he had come a step closer to truth and he had marvelled at her cruel beauty and at the cutting cynicism of her design. Nothing mattered that that truth meant disaster for humanity, nothing mattered that with that truth he had killed his own father; “Yes, Levi, I am disgusting,” he had wanted to say. “Let me tell you exactly why I am. I am disgusting because I have killed my father, and parricide is odious to the gods as much as pride. But that was only foolish naivety and I can’t even claim for myself the dignity and the revolting grandeur of a heinous crime. I am disgusting like a child who can’t keep his mouth shut and who doesn’t learn from his mistakes—because I’ll probably make my mistake again against you all; because I can’t give up on it . . . I can’t give it up . . .”

And it was the image of his father lying in a damp cell what followed him down the streets and lurked in the dark and behind the corners; it was Zackley saying, “You are like me, you don’t want to die.”; it was Mike saying, “You . . . you have something that—”; it was Nile saying, “You have chosen Titans over Marie.”; and it was Levi that lurked in the shadows, saying, “You disgust me,” and it was Levi asking, “Is it so important to you? More than humanity’s victory?”. And it was himself in the shadows, answering, “Yes, yes, yes; for when the truth of this world shall be revealed, I must be there to witness it.”

And he knew he could be delivered only by accepting the eventuality of death for humanity’s sake without resenting it at all; but he felt he could not, for his mind was not with humanity anymore.

Erwin Smith knew that it was a cracked and broken path the one on which he was crawling; but it was his path—and if Levi failed him at the very end and he would have to make him step aside, then he would, _he would, he would he would he would he would he_ ⸺

There was a knock on the door.

His mind recoiled from its thought, which cartwheeled away until he couldn’t grasp it anymore and all that was left was a sharp and revolting shame. He stood there, motionless, but he did not have time to investigate the feeling; whoever it was outside knocked again with more force and Erwin went to open the door.

It was Levi, appeared as if conjured. Erwin felt himself becoming suddenly guarded, as if Levi could see and make sense of his bad thoughts before Erwin himself could.

“Levi—” he said. What are you doing here, he had meant to add but he looked at Levi in his face and his voice died in his throat. Levi’s face was terrible, a mask of dread. The dim light did nothing to conceal the deathly pallor of that face, the drawn skin over the cheekbones and at the mouth, and the long shadows projected by the lamp played over it, making the black circles of insomnia look even more sunken under the eyes. Levi was looking at him but it was as if he were looking through a thin veil of stupor; his eyes were dazed and seemed unseeing. His lips were white and drawn, pressed in a thin and almost invisible line.

Ice-cold fear washed over Erwin at the sight, and a thousand ominous thoughts of a terrible catastrophe raged across his head: people rioting, an ambush from the Military Police, Eren captured, Wall Rose being actually breached and Titans approaching. 

“Hi,” Levi said. There was a strain in his voice, and that simple and almost mechanical attempt to hide the agitation that could be read clearly on his every feature did nothing but heighten all the signs of turmoil his soul must be in.

Erwin stood there, staring at him until Levi added impatiently, “Do I have to stand here like an idiot all night, or are you going to let me in before I drop dead in front of your fucking door?”

Erwin let him in. 

“Levi, what is it?” he said, locking the door behind them. His fingers trembled slightly against the key and he realized that he was afraid; the sense of foreboding he had felt earlier in the evening crept over him again and settled into his soul, coiled like a snake ready to strike.

“It’s nothing,” Levi said, looking around as Erwin went back to sit at his desk by the window. “Do you have anything to drink?”

Erwin gestured towards the jug and the single glass resting on his bedside table. “I’m afraid that’s all I have to offer,” he said.

Levi considered the half-full glass for a second, and Erwin felt stupidly embarrassed. It was clear it had been used already, and he expected to see a disgusted sneer flash across Levi’s face before his offer was turned down. But Levi grabbed the glass and gulped the contents down. Erwin stared, stunned; the gesture, simple as it was, surprised him a great deal. Levi smacked the glass back down, as if he had drank something very strong instead of just a mouthful of water. Something was wrong, and Erwin could not stand it; the fact that there was two of them made it all the more real. 

He said tentatively, “Levi, why are you here?” 

“It’s nothing,” Levi said. 

“I take myself the liberty of not believing that. No offence,” Erwin said. 

Levi’s eyes were instantly on him, suddenly wary. “What’s this shit? Don’t do that. You know I fucking hate that,” he said.

Erwin smiled, conciliatory. “No, you’re right. I’m sorry. But, Levi, please.”

As he said that, Erwin realized he wasn’t sure what he was expecting to hear. It wasn’t entirely unheard of that Levi would seek him at odd times—though it had never been at night before, nor in his private quarters, either. But there was something strange in the air that night, some unknown thing that Erwin could feel but not quite grasp. And Levi’s face when he had opened the door . . . He wasn’t acting right, as if he too could sense some unsettling force that was holding them, and yet that was beyond their understanding.

Levi said, “I sent the brats to bed something like an hour ago but couldn’t sleep myself. I wandered around a bit and saw the light under your door, so I guessed I would just . . .” His voice dwindled into silence. 

Erwin felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He could see Levi hesitating before his closed door, debating whether or not to knock and be with Erwin in that uncertain and mysterious hour, while behind that door he was thinking the most treacherous thoughts.

“Naturally,” he said, and was silent.

Levi stood there by the bedside; his fingers played distractedly on the lip of the glass.

“You didn’t come tonight,” he said absently after a while.

“No,” Erwin said, “I didn’t come.” I didn’t wish to see you, Erwin did not say.

He shuffled his papers in front of him, as if that could provide an explanation, but Levi wasn’t looking at him. He sensed that Levi was testing the waters, getting ready for a confession. He waited.

“It was a nice party,” Levi said monotonously. “The men are excited; even the brats are. We wondered if you would show up. Maybe you had better; there was wine.”

As if to emphasize his words, he filled himself another glass of water; he didn’t drink it.

“Did you find them well?” asked Erwin.

Levi hesitated, and all Erwin’s being hesitated with him.

“Yes,” he said, but there was no sentiment there; his voice sounded faraway. Erwin was silent; Levi moved. 

He walked to the window and looked outside. He sighed, and Erwin couldn’t remember of ever hearing Levi sigh. It chilled him to the bone. 

“I don’t know,” said Levi quietly. “I was there, and I heard the kids talking,” he said, “and I had this odd feeling . . .” He paused. Erwin watched him and said nothing. 

Levi said, “I guess I’m just worried—for the brats, for the men, for the mission. Maybe I’m just tired and on edge.” His voice was weak; it was as if he were asking “what is this all about? what’s happening to me?”; from him came something like a desire for comfort he couldn’t dare to voice. Erwin could see his pale, haunted face in the moonlight and saw his own fears reflected there; he tried to search into their shared dread, but failed. 

Levi turned slowly toward him; he looked sick with worry, and in his eyes there was a kind of doom. And Erwin knew then that he wasn’t going to stand in front of those closed doors anymore.

He called him, “Levi,” he said, motioning to get up, to go to him.

But in two strides Levi was already to him; he grabbed Erwin by the collar and kissed him.

It was the kiss of a boy—a dry, hard, almost violent press of the lips—and in his surprise Erwin felt a turbid anger rise inside of him. For a moment, he thought that Levi was trying to seduce him into not leaving with them tomorrow. And before he could stop the thought from forming, he was reminded of Marie.

Of course she hadn’t seduced him, not in that way. They had barely spoken to one another—perhaps a couple of times. All that Erwin knew about Marie, even back then, was what Nile told about her, and he told a great deal. Erwin had been in love with her. He had been in love with her in the same dark way men like him are often secretly in love with the ordinary and quiet life that is placed beyond their reach by their own vision: he had loved her like a symbol and a mystification. 

But as he had loved her, he had darkly resented her, for in his youth he had thought that his cause would come over him like an all consuming fire and there couldn’t be a place for anything else. But there had to be some longing to feed the flame, and she had provided one: she was both the promise of a life he could never hope for and the treacherous temptation of it. He had loved her for that, and for that he had resented her and had been angry at her, for he had been tempted. And through a resentfulness and an anger she did not deserve, he had despised himself, until he had grown old enough to know that the duty of a life is a grave and sombre thing. 

It was in the circumstances of events that the feeling, long dormant and ugly, had reared its head. But it was only a flare. For Levi was not Marie. He was not a promise of family, of a peaceful and ordinary life Erwin wasn’t sure he could ever desire for himself. He was not someone who would seduce him away from his purpose with the prospect of tranquillity, nor a token of what could never be. 

Levi was a soldier. He was his man, someone who fought at his side. And he too would go at his order, he too would go to face probable death tomorrow. Erwin knew that they could both be dead before the dawning of the new day.

Erwin gazed at him. He didn’t look loving nor lustful; he was looking up at Erwin as if he were a tremendous shape of impending doom. Despite being the one who had come to Erwin’s door in the dead of night, he looked terrified—whether of Erwin, of himself or of what awaited them all, Erwin could not tell.

He touched Levi’s face gently, felt him shiver, and kissed him on the mouth. Levi let him. It was a meek kiss—nothing more than a sweet exploration of the lips—but Erwin felt his head float and spin. 

When he broke it, he searched Levi’s face intently. A light flush had come over his cheeks. He saw desire there; it was barely noticeable—all wrapped in a burning hesitance as it was—but it was there, a stranger on those sharp features, yet surprisingly becoming. And along with desire there was an edge of reluctance, of a primal and very private fear.

Suddenly, Erwin understood. 

Something unspeakable stirred in him. He decided not to insult Levi by asking him whether he was sure, by saying that he hadn’t consented to anything yet; if Levi was there at all it meant he had already thought about it, and if he hadn’t it meant he didn’t want to in the first place.

Softly, Erwin said, “I will take care of you,” and then wondered too late if it might have been the wrong thing to say—it could be misunderstood; but he saw in Levi’s eyes that it had been received in the way it was meant to.

Erwin felt a deep generosity soar into his pleasure then—he wanted nothing more than to give, give everything, give all that he had kept within himself through the lonely years, and give it openly—and he was overwhelmed by the novelty of it. But as he looked at Levi, he knew that he was going to meet his own pleasure like he went into battle: with defiance, and a shadow of surrender.

Erwin touched him again, and soon he found out that, despite the reluctance of the spirit, Levi’s body was all ready for what was about to happen, it was primed for it, and he looked at him with eyes full of wonder. And as he guided Levi to the bed, his head raised up and his eye was caught in the brightness of the moon outside. 

She was fat and beautiful and unperturbed. And he thought of the fishes of the big lakes in the wide lands within the Walls which sometimes threw themselves ashore to die under her meek and primal gaze; he thought of the critters, crawling out of their dens to feed—of the small, lurking beasts and of the great prowlers; he thought of the Titans that stirred and rose to meet her light and wandered in the stillness of an empty world. And he too felt dragged by her unfathomable and irresistible force, as he kneeled between Levi’s legs to greedily drink at his spring.

A sound, delicious and filthy, escaped Levi’s lips, and Erwin was pleased, so he set himself to hear it again and again—and again Levi sang his pleasure until Erwin’s mouth retreated from his hot, wet flesh. 

Erwin sat back on his heels and looked keenly into Levi’s eyes and at his naked body laid before him. A foot came into his face and he grabbed it at the ankle, and kissed and bit playfully at it, and suckled at the toes and chuckled at the soft groan of “gross” that was heard, muffled by a folded arm.

“Nothing about you is gross,” Erwin said softly as he lay down beside Levi. 

“How the fuck would you know that?” Levi protested mildly. 

“Oh, I don’t know. I have this feeling,” said Erwin.

He lay still, until Levi edged close to him and curled over his arm. Erwin caressed him lightly and finally, carefully, he pressed against him. He breathed slowly—hot and deliberate.

Levi said huskily, “Yes, I feel you,” and Erwin wanted to please him. 

But as he moved to embrace him, his stump twitched helplessly and uselessly, and Erwin felt trapped. Levi’s body was heavy over his arm—too heavy and too lovely—and he could not move, could only lie there like the cripple he was. He groaned his frustration into Levi’s shoulder and latched his mouth on a recent scar he found there.

He felt Levi stiffen. Levi said, “Hey—” and shifted away from him. 

Unable to guess what was holding Erwin back, he thought his hesitance was because of him, for certain care towards him. 

He turned around and sat up, pushing Erwin down against the mattress. Suddenly, he was transfigured. 

Every trace of reluctance disappeared as he straddled Erwin’s body, his eyes fierce and stormy. 

“Hey,” he said, “I’m not a fucking doll you can break.” 

And surely enough his body resembled the body of a small divinity of love and war, hot and sharp and lovely, and his face was the face of a soldier as he poised himself to fearlessly take his own pleasure from Erwin. 

Blood trickled down as the flesh was torn, a red ribbon binding them in their intimacy, and the hiss of pain soon blended into the whines of pleasure. And in his arrogance, Erwin had thought he had made him. But, seeing him moving over him—his back arched and his lips parted in pleasure, the head thrown back and his arms wide, hands gripping the sheets, his thighs strained and trembling—he realized how wrong he had been, how much so. 

Nobody had made Levi; he simply _was_. 

And, oh, Erwin thought then, he is the most beautiful thing in the world.

He pressed hard against him. And the night was ambrosial and warm.

 

 

Afterwards he dozed off, and he woke up to Levi’s fingers on his brow and his temple, he woke up to his palm against his face. He opened his eyes and met his gaze; it wasn’t affectionate but hard and guarded. Erwin knew instantly that he was going to leave.

“Stay,” he said.

Levi let his hand drop on the pillow. “Are _you_ going to stay?” he asked.

“No,” Erwin said. “I can’t.”

“Then I can’t stay either,” said Levi. He said, “I have things I must deal with and I can’t do that here. If you want to humour yourself like that, you can do whatever you want—and I meant it when I said that I would trust your judgement, no matter what I . . . But I refuse to go unprepared.” His voice was stern. “And besides,” he added, “I need to wash up.”

They looked silently at one another, and their eyes were searching, trying to feel the soul behind those of the other, but failing. 

Levi moved first. He got up from the bed and Erwin followed him with his eyes and with a sense of finality in his soul, as Levi put his clothes back on. When he was dressed, he stood in the middle of the room and turned to look at Erwin. He said nothing. Erwin saw the haunted look return over his eyes like mist across the moor, but most of it was like an ageless fatigue. 

Levi went to the door. When it was open and he had stepped on the threshold, Erwin spoke.

“Is it so important to you?” he said. “Me staying behind.”

Levi recognised his own words from that afternoon and went very still.

“Yes,” he said after a pause.

“More than humanity’s victory?”

Levi did not answer immediately, and Erwin saw him stiffen a little—and then relax. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he delivered to the empty corridor outside. “It’s the same thing.” 

He went away without a backward glance, closing the door behind him.

“So that’s it, then,” Erwin said softly.

He looked outside the window. 

_Watchman, what of the night?_

The moon was turning paler as the faintest glow of dawn rose from the ground and climbed up across the sky. 

_Watchman, what of the night? The morning cometh._

He said quietly to himself, “If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh.” He was silent for a while. He said to the empty room, “But I feel tomorrow I’ll be crying.”

He looked at the fading moon outside and felt a prayer come to his lips. 

_Don’t let me be a disgrace to my men, nor to myself. Please, don’t let me be a disgrace to them. I don’t want to be a bad man. I don’t want to be a bad commander. May I lead them well, tomorrow._

But he knew that only the inscrutable future held the answer to his plea, and there was peril coming. And still, there was a kind of exultation in his quiet waiting for the dawn.

*

 

The light had already left the town; only the topmost of the Town Hall tower was still aflame against the sky with the red glow of sunset.

In the shadow below, a small crowd was gathered, made up of the only inhabitants of Trost District—mostly civilians in charge of reconstruction and their families, few soldiers of the Garrison and even less of the Military Police. On the walkway of Wall Rose stood the whole of the Survey Corps: one hundred men, the green cloaks flapping in the wind. Behind them, somewhere beyond the crown of red light on the horizon, unseen, lay Wall Maria, their destination and their hope.

There was a slight dampness riding the breeze, and a hint of clouds approaching suggested that the sky would be covered by night, blotting out the brightness of the moon.

The horses shuffled tensely in the hoists, snorting softly, and the men were silent. The sunlight gleamed rightly upon their swords, upon the instruments of death. The air was charged and electric, and Erwin could feel his own blood thrum in his veins. 

He sensed Levi standing close beside him and he looked at him. He was looking down at the people below, his lips tight. In his mind, Erwin put his hand on his nape, like his father used to do to him, but there was a tenderness there that belonged only to a lover. As if sensing the imaginary touch, Levi glanced up at him. 

It was in that moment that the crowd stirred and heaved like an animal, as a young and clear voice broke the silence with a cheer. It was the Reeves boy. A wave of excitement gripped the people and soon everybody was shouting. Eren and the kids shouted back, and that spurred the crowd more, breaking the tension of the moment, but not its reverential importance.

Erwin, who had always been greeted with hostile whispers and keening wails, had never seen anything like that before. 

Levi said, “How long has it been since the Survey Corps had a send-off like this? Has it ever?”

“No,” said Erwin, stunned, almost stupefied; “As far as I know, it’s the first time.”

He looked down at the people. They were his audience, waiting for the story of their world to be told, a story of truth. In that moment, Erwin knew in himself that he could tell them a good one. He felt that all was well—all was going to be well. He gripped his sword and thrust it up in the air, answering the call. 

They started to descend from the walkway; each and every one of them felt full of promise, of lost things and of unknown things to be gained; but to Erwin it felt as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders, and with it a terrible, sickening guilt had gone.

It can be the same thing, he thought. My God—thank God—it doesn’t have to be one or the other—it can be the same thing; and he wanted to weep for joy as he gave the signal.

_Father, I shall come to thee . . . Father I shall come to thee the deluded dreamer I always were; I shall come to thee a man._

They advanced into the sunset.

⸺

EPILOGUE

 

The air was stifling in the small room, and the stench of blood and death was nauseating.

Levi had a hard time associating the smell of the body that was lying on the bed to the strong, sweet scent of Erwin that he had known only a few hours prior. 

It seemed to him that an eternity had passed since the night he had made love with him, but that was little more than forty-eight hours before.

He knew that if he brought himself to reach with his hand and touch the body lying before him, he would be able to feel the very last of Erwin’s warmth. But he couldn’t do that, because he was certain that if he did, he would shatter. Levi could not afford that. There was work to do. But that would have to wait, just now.

His mind felt stuffed and numb—uncomprehending. _I have done this_ , he kept reminding himself; _it was I who has done this_. But the more he repeated it, the less it made sense. 

It felt like slowly sinking into cold, still waters; but he knew that it was better than to wade through the thick mist that had settled around him and see what lay beyond—better than to look the Gorgon in the eye. He had learnt that staring into the sun for too long rendered you blind. The body on the bed was proof of that. Such proof that could last you a lifetime. Not a living proof, though, ha-ha.

Someone was in the room with him and was now talking to him, but the words eluded him. A hand came to his shoulder like an anchor on reality and he didn’t flinch away, and he could decipher the words that were being spoken. 

“He looks peaceful, doesn’t he?” 

It was Hange. Levi looked at Erwin’s white face and then his gaze travelled down and came to rest over the bloody rags tied around the body’s middle, from where the worst of the stench came. Erwin had been eviscerated by a fucking flying rock and left there to bleed. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the agony of such a death. What the fuck was peaceful about that? 

But then he thought of Moblit being blown to pieces; he thought of Isabel’s severed head on the grass, of Farlan’s mangled body. 

“Yes,” he said.

Hange said, “That’s what you wished, right? Isn’t it why you chose to save Arlert, instead?” and her voice was soft and far away and very close.

Why? Of course, _why_. All of his reasons, he knew, must have made sense to him, at some point; but they had somehow deserted him, and he was still in the process of recovering them, which felt like searching for a key feeling through the mud of an endless, blood-soaked, body-strewn battlefield with shaky fingers. 

Why. He had asked so to himself over and over again, and over and over again he had come up with the same answer.

_I did it because he asked me to._

At first, he had not understood it. But then it had become so clear he had wondered how it had been that he had not seen it before, and the knowledge had come over him like a deep calmness.

Erwin had wanted to die, had wanted to for a long, long time. 

But there had been something which didn’t let him, something that had made him want to live more—something turbid that had once been beautiful but had rotted away like an overripe fruit. His vision, which had once guided him, had become heavy on him, making him crawl and squirm against death. All it took were Levi’s strong and sure fingers to pry the chains open—and then Erwin was ready.

But how could he explain it to her? She hadn’t been there. _She_ hadn’t been there when Erwin had faltered, stumbled, when he had let himself fall down at last under his heavy burden and the silence had drowned the screams, as he surrendered before Levi. She hadn’t been there to hear his tired, so tired voice speak those sorrowful words of yearning and loss. How could he explain how he had heard the unspoken plea for help, and the soft and tender anger that had gripped him and brought him to his knees before him?—his guide, who died to guide him? She hadn’t seen the smile of relief on Erwin’s lips as Levi sent him to his own death, and his smile had been the soft and inscrutable smile of deliverance.

_Levi, thank you._

He couldn’t have done anything for him then. He only wished that his death had been a quicker one.

He felt sick at heart.

Oh, to hell with it, he thought. 

Levi did not turn to look at her, but kept his eyes fixed on Erwin’s face as he spoke gravely his own apology and absolution. 

“It’s because he needed my help to become the man he wanted to be.” His eyes were full with the sight of the body. He said very quietly, “He knew I would always obey. He knew I could read him, and he knew I would always obey.” 

He said louder, abruptly, “Now get me a cloth and some water. And after you do, don’t come in here again, and make sure everybody else stay the hell away from here for the next few hours.”

Hange left him without having the slightest idea of what Levi had meant with his answer. But being confused never upset her; on the contrary, she felt mildly thrilled. After all, confusion is the first step to understanding.

⸺

_end_

⸺

**Author's Note:**

> The title—despite that the laurel, which is mentioned in the song, does not occur in the story—was chosen as an allusion to the fact that a laurel wreath is placed both on the head of poets and at the feet of the graves of fallen soldiers.
> 
> I am not . . . entirely happy with how this came out, but I posted it anyway for accountability to myself. Feedback of any kind, positive or negative, would be really appreciated. Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
